WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China is struggling to meet food
safety demands from trading partners as it slowly modernizes a
food production system still rooted in small-scale family
farms, U.S. and Chinese officials said on Tuesday.

"China is a country in economic transition and it has a
mixture of traditional problems and modern problems that both
coexist," Wu Yongning, an official at the Chinese Center for
Disease Control and Prevention, said in a seminar on food
safety at a Washington think tank.

Those problems, he said, now range from improper food
preparation on family-run farms to shortcuts taken on
industrial chicken farms.

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Fred Gale, a senior economist at the U.S. Agriculture
Department's Economic Research Service, said China was
embracing new technologies and reforming laws in a bid to bring
safer food to consumers at home and abroad.

He said that "islands" of top-notch production where modern
practices are the norm are spreading in China.

But he said the problem remains in the smaller farms and
facilities, which still account for the lion's share of
production, that may fall below regulators' radar screen.

That disparity in quality became a sore point among U.S.
politicians this year after a spate of unsafe Chinese imports
-- food and other goods -- turned up on U.S. shores.

The Chinese imports are only one part of a larger story
about dangerous or adulterated goods, made here or abroad, that
has unsettled consumer confidence.

But Chinese food makes up a more and more important slice
of what Americans eat. From 1990 to 2006, China's share of U.S.
food imports grew from 1.5 percent to 5 percent, according to
the Agriculture Department.

The Bush administration is taking steps to crack down on
the problem, including a new agreement that would bring tighter
oversight of problem goods coming from China and would allow
U.S. auditors to visit Chinese plants.